Q: Are you willing to make an apology to investors?
Steve: You know we hear from customers who love this phone and have a great experience with it, and we're doing a lot to help them with any issues they're seeing. To investors, you know, you invest in the company we are, so if the stock goes down $5... I don't think I owe them an apology.
Whether or not Jobs is bs-ing about loving his customers so much, I wish more CEOs took this attitude. I think that doing your best to make your customers happy reaps far more benefits in the long haul than doing your best to make investors happy. In Apple's case at least, the fact that they ignored what their investors demanded of them during their dark days actually made the investors a lot more money.
I'm glad Gdgt ran this full quote. Engadget unfortunately dropped the first part of it from their liveblog (not really a problem, they're typing and submitting pretty quickly) but then ran an article that started "Apple's not really ready to say it's sorry about the iPhone 4 antenna design..."
The key difference here is a CEO that is interested in building long-term value and great products that customers love, rather than a CEO who is only incentivized to create short-term shareholder value.
I think this is the correct attitude when you're an entertainment company, or a company that does have a direct relationship with costumers, but might not work for other types, such as services for enterprises.
I run a B2B company and I think customer focus is effective there as well. I'm in a small niche but with enough competitors to see other approaches. I've seen competitors with what looked like great marketing, great sales efforts, and important looking partnerships.
We don't do any of that. We just try to do our best with each customer and grow from word of mouth. For awhile I thought we were going to get creamed by all these other companies that seemed to have the sales/marketing activities nailed. But in the end we seem to be growing much faster and most of the efforts from other companies to ram their product down people's throats weren't just less effective, they completely failed.
I think in B2B, customer focus leads to repeat business, expanded scope of business with existing customers, and word of mouth. Normally once you have a sale your margins are really good. Keeping customers happy is where your profits are.
Is it? When you are selling services for enterprises, shouldn't your focus still be on making those businesses happy? I've never been in such a market, so maybe I don't know, but it seems to me like your focus should be similar.
Yes it is, but there the focus on the customer is far less important than on the investors. This is part of something that makes Apple and some other companies unique.
Comments
Q: Are you willing to make an apology to investors? Steve: You know we hear from customers who love this phone and have a great experience with it, and we're doing a lot to help them with any issues they're seeing. To investors, you know, you invest in the company we are, so if the stock goes down $5... I don't think I owe them an apology.
Whether or not Jobs is bs-ing about loving his customers so much, I wish more CEOs took this attitude. I think that doing your best to make your customers happy reaps far more benefits in the long haul than doing your best to make investors happy. In Apple's case at least, the fact that they ignored what their investors demanded of them during their dark days actually made the investors a lot more money.
I'm glad Gdgt ran this full quote. Engadget unfortunately dropped the first part of it from their liveblog (not really a problem, they're typing and submitting pretty quickly) but then ran an article that started "Apple's not really ready to say it's sorry about the iPhone 4 antenna design..."
The key difference here is a CEO that is interested in building long-term value and great products that customers love, rather than a CEO who is only incentivized to create short-term shareholder value.
I think this is the correct attitude when you're an entertainment company, or a company that does have a direct relationship with costumers, but might not work for other types, such as services for enterprises.
I run a B2B company and I think customer focus is effective there as well. I'm in a small niche but with enough competitors to see other approaches. I've seen competitors with what looked like great marketing, great sales efforts, and important looking partnerships.
We don't do any of that. We just try to do our best with each customer and grow from word of mouth. For awhile I thought we were going to get creamed by all these other companies that seemed to have the sales/marketing activities nailed. But in the end we seem to be growing much faster and most of the efforts from other companies to ram their product down people's throats weren't just less effective, they completely failed.
I think in B2B, customer focus leads to repeat business, expanded scope of business with existing customers, and word of mouth. Normally once you have a sale your margins are really good. Keeping customers happy is where your profits are.
Is it? When you are selling services for enterprises, shouldn't your focus still be on making those businesses happy? I've never been in such a market, so maybe I don't know, but it seems to me like your focus should be similar.
Yes it is, but there the focus on the customer is far less important than on the investors. This is part of something that makes Apple and some other companies unique.